udev does not make /dev/hd... entries, so with the old drivers, you can only get as far as root mounted read only and its not possible to mount other filesystems unless you either use a static /dev or make the needed /dev/hd.. nodes some other way.

That's not quite correct.
Ever since udev stopped playing with 'NAME=' and stuck to DEVTMPFS, it stopped creating *any* nodes, it just manages permissions on them.
Tuning CONFIG_IDE off makes *kernel* stop creating /dev/hd* nodes.
However, even if kernel did create those nodes, udev isn't marking them with data required by tools like udisks.

The drive detection order is not preserved between the SCSI names and IDE names.
The IDE names come from the IDE bus numbers and master/slave position on the IDE bus, thus /dev/hda and /dev/hdd are the master on the first IDE bus and slave on the second IDE bus. Even if hdb and hdc are missing.

With SCSI naming, these devices would become sda and sdb (no name gaps) but hda may not map to sda ... the order may be reversed.

Gentoo on a Pi is a whole new challenge._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

The drive detection order is not preserved between the SCSI names and IDE names.
The IDE names come from the IDE bus numbers and master/slave position on the IDE bus, thus /dev/hda and /dev/hdd are the master on the first IDE bus and slave on the second IDE bus. Even if hdb and hdc are missing.

With SCSI naming, these devices would become sda and sdb (no name gaps) but hda may not map to sda ... the order may be reversed.

Gentoo on a Pi is a whole new challenge.

Heh.

So what order would you suggest? I have 4 drive bays and 1 USB stick always plugged in. Heck, how do I change the order to begin with? Is a "Can't find drive" problem likely? What if I just removed the fstab file, would it automatically search for other drives?

Sorry, just trying to figure out what my next step is while not falling behind in my other things to do. Fewer reboots I need the better._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

How many drives do you actually have fitted - the bay count no longer matters.

You will hate me for this one - what happens with USB storage is BIOS specific.
USB storage devices are often, but not always, enumerated before real HDDs.
This means that all your HDDs change if you remove/add a USB device ... which means that /etc/fstab needs to change.

What bootloader do you use?
Grub can be used to speed the trial and error.

Its all manageable but the trial and error needed to find your way around when you move from an /dev/hd... to /dev/sd... environment can be painful.

The good news is once you know what it is, it will stay fixed unless you add/remove storage devices.

Oh. Optical drives don't count. Your first optical drive will be /dev/sr0, you and your Gentoo might disagree about first ..._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

How many drives do you actually have fitted - the bay count no longer matters.

Each bay is filled.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

You will hate me for this one - what happens with USB storage is BIOS specific.
USB storage devices are often, but not always, enumerated before real HDDs.
This means that all your HDDs change if you remove/add a USB device ... which means that /etc/fstab needs to change.

My PPC computer doesn't have BIOS, it has OpenFirmware. It doesn't setup the /dev/ orders, it sets up its own hardware paths. I don't know how to determine which way it works.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

What bootloader do you use?
Grub can be used to speed the trial and error.

Grub is Intel Only, I use yaboot, being the only bootloader available for OpenFirmware PPC computers.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Its all manageable but the trial and error needed to find your way around when you move from an /dev/hd... to /dev/sd... environment can be painful.

The good news is once you know what it is, it will stay fixed unless you add/remove storage devices.

Oh. Optical drives don't count. Your first optical drive will be /dev/sr0, you and your Gentoo might disagree about first ...

The detection order or normally in the same order at the devices appear on the PCI bus.
So the primary drive on the first IDE controller will be sda and the slave sdb
The primary drive on the second IDE controller will be sdc and slave sdd.

Now its all messed up by USB. That may be sde ... if you are really lucky, or it may be sda and the drives I listed above will all move down one.

Other ordering is rare but possible. I had forgotten you were a PPC user.
I once had access to a Mac G5 (remote access only) from what I remember, yaboot is much like lilo. There is no opportunity for editing the boot command before its executed.

Can you establish if the USB device is sda or sde ?_________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

The detection order or normally in the same order at the devices appear on the PCI bus.
So the primary drive on the first IDE controller will be sda and the slave sdb
The primary drive on the second IDE controller will be sdc and slave sdd.

Now its all messed up by USB. That may be sde ... if you are really lucky, or it may be sda and the drives I listed above will all move down one.

So I have 4 drive bays with drives, and 1 USB drive. This implies to me that sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde are possible.

Since this drive is in "Bay 1", that implies to me that it is most likely to be one of three options: sda (Left-to-right, USB last), sdb (Left-to-right, USB first), sdd (Right-to-left, USB last), and sde (Right-to-left, USB first).

Since this is "Bay 1", it presumably comes first in the lineup (it is called "ultra0" by OpenFirmware), so sde and sdd are not as likely.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Other ordering is rare but possible. I had forgotten you were a PPC user.
I once had access to a Mac G5 (remote access only) from what I remember, yaboot is much like lilo. There is no opportunity for editing the boot command before its executed.

You can set partitions, location to boot image, drive name according to OF, and you can add commands, like "video=ofonly", on the spot, just before you boot.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Can you establish if the USB device is sda or sde ?

There is no way for me to determine that I know of, all Linux I used on here thus far used hda as the USB stick (I think), and my Mac OS calls the USB stick "disk4"._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

The system has loaded a kernel and switched to framebuffer mode. We can tell that from Tux being spread all over the top of the screen.

The framebuffer is running at a resolution or refresh rate your displays do not support. I guess you have something in your yaboot.conf to set that.
Try removing the framebuffer setup, or changing it for a lower resolution.

As Tux is still on the screen, we can be reasonably sure that booting does not complete but not why.
Do you get flashing keyboard leds - thats a kernel panic?

Can you pretend you are at the login prompt and type
root
<roots_password>
To attempt to log in as root?
It would be informative if the pattern on the screen changed._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

As Tux is still on the screen, we can be reasonably sure that booting does not complete but not why.
Do you get flashing keyboard leds - thats a kernel panic?

Can you pretend you are at the login prompt and type
root
<roots_password>
To attempt to log in as root?
It would be informative if the pattern on the screen changed.

I'm going to test again tonight for flashing keyboard LEDs, but I can tell you two things: 1) When I try to log in, the screen doesn't change, I press enter, type anything, nothing changes. 2) After a few minutes, the computer reboots on its own, showing that at least 1 process hung the system.

The system has loaded a kernel and switched to framebuffer mode. We can tell that from Tux being spread all over the top of the screen.

The framebuffer is running at a resolution or refresh rate your displays do not support. I guess you have something in your yaboot.conf to set that.
Try removing the framebuffer setup, or changing it for a lower resolution.

As Tux is still on the screen, we can be reasonably sure that booting does not complete but not why.
Do you get flashing keyboard leds - thats a kernel panic?

Can you pretend you are at the login prompt and type
root
<roots_password>
To attempt to log in as root?
It would be informative if the pattern on the screen changed.

Decidedly a crash...
After 120 seconds, the system goes down for a restart.

My yaboot.conf has nothing set for screen resolution, or anything for the screen at all for that matter.

LED statuses:
On my USB Hub, there are no lights indicating that there is something plugged in to any of them.
No flashing LEDs.
Optical mouse is powered.
The entire lower bar on the Xserve itself, the lower bank of "Processor Usage" indicators is maxed out, the top bar is completely empty. If Mac OS X was running, that would indicate 1 CPU at 100%, the other at under 5%.
The power LED is on, but that is a hardware default.
There are no flashing LEDs on any device._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

The system has loaded a kernel and switched to framebuffer mode. We can tell that from Tux being spread all over the top of the screen.

The framebuffer is running at a resolution or refresh rate your displays do not support. I guess you have something in your yaboot.conf to set that.
Try removing the framebuffer setup, or changing it for a lower resolution.

As Tux is still on the screen, we can be reasonably sure that booting does not complete but not why.
Do you get flashing keyboard leds - thats a kernel panic?

Can you pretend you are at the login prompt and type
root
<roots_password>
To attempt to log in as root?
It would be informative if the pattern on the screen changed.

Decidedly a crash...
After 120 seconds, the system goes down for a restart.

My yaboot.conf has nothing set for screen resolution, or anything for the screen at all for that matter.

LED statuses:
On my USB Hub, there are no lights indicating that there is something plugged in to any of them.
No flashing LEDs.
Optical mouse is powered.
The entire lower bar on the Xserve itself, the lower bank of "Processor Usage" indicators is maxed out, the top bar is completely empty. If Mac OS X was running, that would indicate 1 CPU at 100%, the other at under 5%.
The power LED is on, but that is a hardware default.
There are no flashing LEDs on any device.

Hello again. I decided to retackle the problem, and see if I can get into my old Gentoo Kernel. I managed, to my shock, and just had to mount the Swap, Var, and Home partitions myself. I was very impressed.
I am emerging Links in the background (having become a more Linux savvy person in the past months), but was wondering... Obviously, to me at least, the last kernel I compiled had problems that it couldn't resolve at boot. How exactly would I fix this? Again, with video=ofonly on the kernel line, I believe it worked just dandy-like. Any suggestions?

Thank you very much to Neddy and VoidMage for sticking with me as I try to get a grip on the guts of the Linux world._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit